The death of 3rd party cookies – and the future of attribution

The death of 3rd party cookies – and the future of attribution

Are you ready for the future of digital marketing? As consumers become ever more privacy-conscious, and Google joins the ranks of search engines rejecting the use of third-party cookies, businesses are looking for ways to plug the hole in their data.

We’re going to look at how your business can move on from the third-party cookie tracking model.

 

Server-side tracking 

Server-side tracking offers the opportunity for marketers and businesses to keep their beloved attribution models  – with a few important changes.

Client-side tracking (the ‘traditional’ analytics approach which has basically powered the last decade of digital marketing and analytics) plants cookies (tiny snippets of code) in the website visitor’s browser, which then send information straight to the ‘third party’ – your data collection platform (Google Analytics or similar).

Server-side tracking requires the website owner to use their own server. This server then allows you to collect the data yourself, using 1st party cookies, then transfer the data onto your data collection platform.

This doesn’t just sidestep the thorny problem of 3rd party cookies – it means that you no longer have to provide options allowing the website visitor to opt-out of tracking, which means that your data will present a much more detailed and rounded picture while offering a more secure data storage and ownership model for your website users.

The catch? Server-side tracking is more expensive and is more technically challenging to implement and maintain.

 

Call tracking and analytics

 If your business involves sales calls, then call tracking is probably on your radar, if you’ve not implemented it already.

Using tracking numbers at different online and offline locations is a well-established way to build rock-solid data about the performance of your different marketing channels. Using our software platform, you’ll be able to know at a glance where each and every sales call came from.

Not just sales calls too – Call360 uses call analytics and conversation intelligence to create a bespoke AI model that will analyse your incoming calls for intent, sentiment, and outcome. This information is then used to classify and segment your calls – so your sales call stats won’t be artificially inflated by customer service calls or internal organisational traffic.

Each and every call will be recorded and stored, available for download at a moment’s notice. You can use these transcripts for staff training purposes or analyse the calls to get a stronger sense of the buying journey that the customer has taken.

Combine this hard attribution data with either the aggregated insights that Google will provide using their Topics API, or a more bespoke analytics solution such as server-side tracking. There might be less data available for free in the future of digital marketing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create attribution models that are accurate and purposeful.

If you’re interested to see how Call360 can help you understand your customers better -even without 3rd party cookies – then get in touch today for your free 14-day trial.